In 1961, jalopies took to the skies — first in the hit Disney comedy The Absent-Minded Professor, and then in a back-up story in DC’s Strange Adventures 136.
In both cases, tinkering scientists come up with inventions that enable their old cars to fly.
In the movie, Professor Brainard (Fred MacMurray) discovers a bouncy substance that gains energy when it strikes a surface, a kind of “flying rubber” which he dubs “Flubber.” By bombarding Flubber with radioactive particles, Brainard is able to make his 40-year-old Model T Ford fly.
And the film got plenty of bounce at the box office, earning more than $25 million.
The Absent-Minded Professor could easily have inspired the DC science fiction story Lost – 100,000 Years! The film opened March 16, 1961, and the comic book appeared on newsstands in November of that year. But whether it did or didn’t, writer Gardner Fox’s tale was in no sense an imitation of the Disney movie.
In it, members of the Time Patrol travel back 100,000 years to Sept. 29, 1961, to prevent Alan Parker from accidentally causing the Second Age of Barbarism.
The Flubber of the piece is “Solargine,” the sun-powered super-motor Parker has invented and installed in his old car.
But the future police tell Parker that solar flares will cause his engine to sweep the Earth with radiation and wipe out civilization. They use their Time Rods to propel Parker and themselves one day past the historic accident.
Yet now, as Parker conducts his test, his car begins to fly, and the time cops discover to their horror that his experiment is nullifying gravity on Earth. They fade away before they can warn Parker he must shut off his motor within one minute or he will destroy humanity.
Though tempted to joy ride through the air, Parker luckily forgoes the opportunity and returns immediately to the ground. Why? Because he remembers that on the day he’s time-skipped, his driver’s license expired. He doesn’t want to get a ticket.
The story’s pencils and inks are by Sid Greene, and they’re sumptuous. I have developed a deeper appreciation of his work over the decades.
The concept of a venerable flying car would be taken out for another spin by James Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming. His children’s novel Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang: The Magical Car was published in 1964.
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